Feminism In Anita Desai's Novel
Introduction
Women writers of all ages have a characteristic inclination for expounding on women characters. Anita Desai is no exemption in so far as she has written, by and large, about women characters; and no big surprise, a large portion of her books move around women characters. As a writer Anita Desai has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she got a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy and she even won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Feminism differs in different periods and different places.
To understand "Feminine", just as we cannot confuse female and feminist, we also cannot presume that anything and everything written by women, will be 'feminine '.
It has long been an established practice among most feminists to use 'Feminine ' (and Masculine) to represent social constructs and to reserve 'Female ' and 'Male ' for the purely biological aspects of sexual difference. Thus, 'feminine ' represents nurture, and 'female ' - nature in this usage. Seen in this perspective, patriarchal oppression consists of imposing certain social standards of femininity on all biological women in order precisely to make us believe that the chosen standards for 'femininity ' are natural. Thus a woman who refuses to conform can be labeled both unfeminine and unnatural. Patriarchy, in other words, wants us to believe that there is such a thing as an essence of femaleness, called
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